Appearing on CNN's "New Day" with host John Berman, polling analyst Harry Enten said Donald Trump is running a disastrous re-election campaign where the president is losing to his presumptive opponent, Joe Biden, on topics near and dear to the public where the president should be dominating.
According to the analyst, the president is "flailing" because his campaign is pursuing a "losing strategy" as revealed by his poor polling numbers.
Using an ABC/Ipsos poll released Friday morning as his guide, Enten explained, "It's important obviously to put this into context because the president is going to be running against somebody else in former Vice President Joe Biden and, when it comes to the issue of the coronavirus and you match up Biden versus Trump, who is trusted more on the issue, the former vice president is trusted by double digits and also on race relations, the other big issue of the day, we see the former vice president trusted by double digits. It's difficult to imagine that the president will win unless something changes."
"The president is trying to turn the focus to the idea of law and order," Berman replied. "I say trying because there's evidence it's not working. Why?"
"There's a lot of evidence," the analyst replied. "There was a great poll taken last month by the Washington Post, and it was asking 'do you want a president focusing on law and order or addressing the racial divisions?' and we see that voters by a nine-point margin said they wanted a president who would be focusing on addressing the nation's racial divisions. So the president is trying to change the subject when Americans don't want to change the subject, right? That's to me the sign of someone who really doesn't understand the electorate. Maybe he understood it in 2016, but he 's not understanding it right now."
"You know, the president trying to change the subject onto something he'd much rather discuss is something we saw in the 2018 midterms," Enten recalled. "Remember the caravan coming up from the south and his party was losing, when they were going to potentially lose the House of Representative? Look at the congressional generic ballot, it showed an eight-point lead when he talked about the caravan and what was the final result? It was Democrats winning by nine points. So there was no difference. In fact, if anything Democrats slightly improved, when you look at history and you look at the one real example where he tried to change the subject to more fertile ground for him it did not work."
"I want you to reiterate the initial point, " host Berman pressed. "It's hard to imagine anything besides the pandemic mattering, more and more Americans dying, the caseload growing. So what should we consider when thinking about that?"
"I think what we should consider is that the president is down by ten points, down by ten points because 20 percent plus say the most important problem is a noneconomic issue in the coronavirus," Enten replied. "It would almost be like FDR saying during World War II, 'don't worry about World War II, don't worry about what's going on overseas.' "
"This is a real problem affecting everyday Americans and, unless the president can change minds on how he's handling the coronavirus, he'll lose and lose bigly" he concluded.
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